after the news of the dead
by altschmerz
Summary: This time, things go differently. This time, Frankie Benz lives. The days following the morning on which he doesn't die are the hardest the Nathan James has lived through yet, but they do live through them. They all do. (au where frankie benz lives. for my hurt/comfort bingo square 'group support'. see warnings in notes. additionally, HOW is there no character option for him?)


for my h/c bingo square 'group support'

inspired by the thought that if up to 5% of the population is immune, that had to have included the ship's crew. what if frankie had been immune the whole time?

WARNINGS: discussion of death/illness, suicide attempt a la frankie's canon death at the beginning, though unsuccessful and not motivated by a desire to die. description of a panic attack near the end.

* * *

 _back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging_

 _after funerals we are saying thank you_

 _after the news of the dead whether or not we knew them_

 _we are saying thank you_

 _W. S. Merwin, "Thanks"_

* * *

It almost happens a dozen different ways. They almost miss the Italian boat entirely. The people on it almost weren't infected. Frankie almost isn't the first one down the stairs, almost doesn't trip when he reaches the bottom, almost, way back home on the _Nathan James_ , picks a biohazard suit without a loose catch on the helmet clasp. One way, the gun jams. One way, Danny grabs it. Most ways, Frankie dies.

This way, this time, Frankie Benz lives.

ooo

For the first few moments, it's all shouting. Tom, who in that moment isn't Tom who is terrified for a young man he cares for but Captain Chandler who is in charge of giving answers, calls orders in his strongest voice. Danny begs, Rachel is frozen. Frankie has a gun in his hand and this is the moment, even more than the Russians in the snow, the news of Rachel's obfuscation, the revelation of the virus, that it all becomes real. This is the moment there is no coming back from.

"I'm not too keen on dying like these people," Frankie says, sounds so calm that Danny is suddenly more afraid even than before, which felt impossible.

"You won't, Frankie, you won't," Danny rushes out in a voice too high and too loud. He says it fast like he hopes it'll bridge the gap between the words and the trigger in time to stop the second from pulling.

It almost doesn't work. Almost.

"I'm infected, Danny." The worst part is, Frankie doesn't even sound upset. Just resigned.

"You might not be!" Danny has enough upset in his voice for the both of them, though. His heart is pounding and everything sounds muffled through the helmet and the rush of his own blood. "Right, doctor?" Danny wants to look at Rachel desperately, wants to look her in the eye and beg for her to tell him 'yes', tell him there's still a chance. He wants to look at her but can't bring himself to look away from Frankie, for fear that in the split second he takes his eyes away, his best friend will be dead and it will all be over. "We don't know for _sure_ he's infected. It's not a hundred percent transmission, people have to have been exposed and not gotten it."

There's a split second of silence, broken only by heavy breathing and water dripping somewhere. The gun is still aimed in the most unthinkable direction, and his words may have been steady and calm but his hand is trembling.

"Yes," is what Rachel finally says. She is a woman of confidence and resolve, and her voice in this moment is quiet and thready. "The rate of exposure to infection isn't one. There have been people who came into contact and lived. Not many. Not often. But there's a chance."

"The _crew_ ," Frankie insists, looking now away from Danny towards Tom. "Captain, we can't infect the crew. We can't take chances with the crew."

"You _are_ the crew!" The words are shrill and Danny _knows_ he sounds hysterical but he doesn't care. All he cares about right now is the bullet in the chamber and doing everything he can to keep it out of his best friend's head. "Captain, this isn't who we are, we don't leave our people behind. Frankie, we can't let you die. Please give me the gun. _Please_."

"Lieutenant Benz." The line between Captain Chandler and Tom is fracturing, splintering and fraying until it's impossible to tell where one stops and the other begins. His voice is pleading even as he issues instructions. " _Frankie_. Give him the gun. This is an order from your Captain, Frankie, give Danny the gun. _Now_."

It's the first hint of hope that sends the first crack into Frankie's voice. "There's a chance?" He's looking at Rachel now and she feels the weight of his life settle onto her chest, suffocating her. "There's a _chance_?"

ooo

When the gun is placed in Danny's hand, it takes all of his willpower not to throw it across the room. Instead he stows it safely away. He clenches his fingers into fists once they're empty, this time to keep himself from touching Frankie immediately, ignoring their bulky gear and hugging him, wiping that godawful blood off his face himself. Instead he's stuck standing next to his eerily silent Captain while Rachel carefully cleans the infected blood off Frankie's cheek.

The hope. The blood didn't get in his eyes, mouth, or nose. Biohazard suits keep things out but can also keep things in. Transmission isn't a guarantee. They can set up a quarantine when back on the ship. There's a chance. A _chance_.

The fear. Even if transmission isn't certain, it's nearly so. So many people have died so fast and so terribly. What if the containment fails and it was all for nothing, just for the whisper of a chance of saving one man. One man, weighed against the world.

ooo

Frankie says as much, once his helmet is back on and the plan is on the tipping point of being set in motion, implemented along with the possibility of irrevocable consequences for everyone involved.

"Or the engine could explode, or the Russians could blow us out of the water, or my suit could have a leak and _I_ could be infected," is how Tom responds to the proposition. "Besides. One man is the world now, Lieutenant. We can save the world but none of it will mean anything if we aren't human anymore when the dust settles."

Frankie almost argues, almost says there's nothing inhuman about letting him do what's right and end the astronomical risk they're all taking. But the looks on the others' faces, the fact that he really, truly, with all his heart, doesn't want to die, leads him to keep his mouth shut and his eyes forward, away from the gun Danny is still carrying. It takes getting outside and seeing the ship, the crew, for the guilt over that to set in. His gut is churning so heavily, focus zeroed in on the _James_ , that Frankie almost doesn't hear Tom when he says he's headed to take the others back to the ship, keep them separated into two groups for now, so he can break the news to the crew all at once after he's had a chance to get the plan together.

ooo

Andrea Garnett almost asks, when Tom drives her, Andy Chung, and the other two from the retrieval team back to the _James_ without Frankie, Danny, and Rachel. Almost. She gets through the first sound, the whoosh of the beginning of a 'why' echoing over biohazard suit radios before she sees the look on his face, clear even through the scuffed visor plastic. The deception makes Tom feel sick. Keeping things from his crew feels wrong, even without outright lying to them, and he wonders how much of that he can take before he cracks wide open, tells them everything.

When he gets back and Frankie is still standing, the gun is still in Danny's possession, a tightness Tom couldn't explain releases his throat, allowing the stale recycled air to pass once again into his lungs.

ooo

"What now, sir?" Frankie asks Tom, standing outside his newly constructed isolation room with Rios and Rachel.

"We wait," Rachel answers for him. Frankie wants to crack a joke, to shout something at her, anything to make her stop looking at him like he's already died. "Sorry we couldn't make the place any homier." She sends a distasteful look around at his small, clinical room. Someone's got him a couple of his books, a deck of cards, but it's not much to make it feel less like a lab, a place a doomed man has gone to die.

"It's temporary either way, right?" It's the best attempt Frankie can make at a joke, but nobody else smiles.

"We'll keep you on regular rounds of antibiotics," Rios tells Frankie with a serious, professional look on his face that's almost convincing enough to get Frankie to believe there's any point in that outside of making them feel like they're doing anything at all to help. "Dr. Scott will be in shortly to draw some blood for testing. Other than that, we should keep contact severely limited. People can talk with you from out here, but no one else can enter the room."

Frankie snorts, pretending his eyes aren't burning right now, like the prospect of facing the next couple of days so completely alone isn't eons worse than facing it at all, nevermind that he'd known this from the jump. It didn't make sense that anyone would be allowed in. Hearing it out loud, however, is different somehow. He nods, just to be sure they know he understands.

ooo

Life becomes, at that point, a series of moments, one passed through only to find another on the other side. A moment to draw blood, the slick feel of Rachel's gloved hands on his arm. Frankie watches the clear tube with its yellow cap fill quickly and imagines the rapid click of a roulette table. Place your chips, is Franklin Benz a dead man? Step right up, the winner gets to choose the tombstone. A moment for Rachel to leave through the two-door exit system - not perfect but the best they can do without notice. A moment for her to enter her lab at the far end of the room. A moment for Tom and Rios to leave, for Danny to step out of the corner he's been waiting in, not having left through all the set-up.

ooo

"Not exactly five star," Danny says, forcing the joke not because he wants to but because he has to, if only so that neither of them will fall over the edge they're both teetering on precariously, slip into a hysteria they won't make it back from.

"I dunno, man, at least I won't be sleeping couple feet from _your_ ass." Frankie gives as close as he can get to a grin and they both pretend it doesn't look watered down and brittle. "You snore too loud."

"I do not," snorts Danny in return, like everything is fine. Like they aren't waiting on an answer they might not be able to bear to hear. "You're thinking of the Admiral."

"Don't blame _him_." _Please take care of him_.

"Please, he knows what he's done." _You know I will_.

ooo

 _At least I won't be sleeping couple feet from_ your _ass._

It's only the fact that he knows he isn't alone that permits Frankie to sleep at all that night. He closes his eyes tight shut and can almost imagine, with the second cot Danny had dragged over from god knows where not six inches away from him, only that plastic siding between them, that he can feel Danny's back pressed against his. He can hear Danny's voice in his head, a smile in his words, 'I've got your back, Benzo'. It's never felt more true than now. It's never felt more like a lifeline.

ooo

"You're serious." It's there in his voice, exactly how much Mike does not want to be having this conversation, pointing out the risks they're taking.

"Of course I'm serious. What was I supposed to do, let him die?" It's taken fifteen years of friendship to reach the point they're at now, where Mike can read in an instant the look on Tom's face, the way he's pacing, to tell that under the veneer of competence and composure, Tom Chandler is fucking terrified.

"Obviously not." Mike shakes his head. He is at once thinking of a dozen different things and trying to avoid thinking of anything at all. It's so tempting to focus on Frankie Benz, on the one man they might actually be able to save, versus the two hundred plus people they might kill in trying to save him. The world they might kill if this all goes as horribly wrong as it might. "But think about it for a minute, Tom. We're risking the mission for one man, and of _course_ we're gonna do it, but we need to be aware of it. Of the _risks_ we're taking."

"There's no point in the mission if we don't risk it for one man, Mike." It's only now that Tom stops pacing and looks right at his XO, appearing in that moment how stone carvers must once have imagined Atlas.

"You're right." It's reached an uncountable multitude, the number of times Mike has found himself thinking or saying this. Sometimes he pretends that makes him embarrassed or annoyed rather than immeasurably proud. "Of course, you're right."

ooo

When the Captain arrives to talk to Danny, Frankie decides he gets to be kind of a coward for a minute or two, seeing as he is probably about to die horribly, and pretends he's still asleep. He misses a lot of the nuance about the following interaction, the movement, the expressions accompanying tones, but he hears all of the words, the entire exchange between his captain and his best friend.

ooo

"You can't stay here forever. You've still got a job to do."

"I can't leave him alone."

"You won't. _We_ won't."

ooo

The mission is put on the line for one man, but it won't stop for him, and Danny almost laughs at the contrast. Almost but doesn't, because he's walking away, because he has to leave Frankie behind, because Frankie hasn't so much as coughed the whole time and Danny is petrified of what he might come back to.

ooo

When he gets there for the first time since the beginning of what feels like the longest day of Danny's life, his and Frankie's shared room is empty. The beds are neatly made. The air is still. Frankie's books are gone. Danny knows where they are, knows why they aren't there, but there is still something about the absence that feels so much like a loss that it hits him in the gut, taking his breath away.

They would've given Frankie's flag to him. He knows it. His flag and a box of his books pulled out of their place and piled in neat little stacks. Somewhere in that box, tucked beside Isaac Asimov or a Star Trek novelization, the beaded good luck charm Frankie's little sister made for him just before this most recent time they'd shipped out. They would've given it all to him, and Danny suddenly feels sick. The books are gone and Frankie could die and he is totally helpless to do anything about it.

Danny Green puts his face into his hands, drops down onto the bottom bunk, and sobs like the world is ending. Like it already has.

ooo

"I was so selfish." Danny's voice is empty and distant and Kara is worried. "When we found out what was happening and everyone was so scared for their families back home and I thought 'thank god, everyone I care about is right here'." His face twists sharply and he tugs at the collar of his shirt. Kara wants to stop him, wants to tell him it's okay, but the expression he wears freezes her voice in her throat.

(There's a tiny, terrible voice in the back of Kara's head telling her not to stop him, that maybe he'll finally open up to her, maybe some questions she under good conscience would never ask him might nevertheless be answered.)

"It always felt weird, calling it home." Even Danny's voice is filled with shame and disgust. Kara's sternum contracts. "I don't have anyone else. Everyone I care about is here on this ship where I thought we were safe, I thought I could keep them safe, and-" He shakes his head once, twice, so hard she's worried he might hurt himself. "It was awful and selfish and I felt so _lucky_. I had no one out there to be scared for and now he- he could-"

When Kara touches his shoulder, she can feel how all of Danny's muscles are stiff and contracted, his body held rigidly as he shakes out the fear and grief he doesn't want to have to feel, was never prepared to feel.

ooo

"Hah, my round again!"

Kara drops her cards and groans, watches Frankie crow over his, and hopes this is helping.

It would be easier to say she's here, playing a jerry-rigged game of Speed you can make work with a wall between players, because Danny asked her to. That Frankie's death would hurt her because it would hurt him, rather than because she can still feel the air rushing past her face as she anchors a rope while Frankie rappels down onto an unfamiliar ship bringing gifts to strangers. Rather than because his eyes sparkle like no one's she's ever known, because he's got a great singing voice but is too self-conscious to sing in front of anyone.

Because Frankie is her _friend_.

"Penny for your thoughts?"

Kara looks up at Frankie and smiles. "Just thinking about how your ass is mine this round, Benzo." He grins back at her and they both shuffle again.

ooo

Danny is a given, Kara assumed, Rachel a constant in the background. A couple people from his unit, filtering in and out in an anticipated revolving door fire watch that Frankie will never try to express his gratitude for because he knows he will never find adequate words.

Cosetti, he's a surprise. He arrives to tell Danny it's his watch, staying as Danny leaves. He stands by Danny's cot and shifts from foot to foot and looks guilty. His face, his posture, his hands wound together in front of him, marred by a deep, sick guilt.

"Cosetti," Frankie greets. They've never spoken before, but that's the nice thing about uniforms. Never have to ask for anyone's name.

"I just thought you aughta know," Cosetti says in a voice Frankie graciously pretends he heard no tremor in, "that I'm filling in for you while you're-" He stumbles over getting the words out and Frankie flinches, graciousness vanishing. "While you're out."

"Probably a permanent position, then." It's maybe a little rude, his voice maybe a little sharp, but Frankie figures he's entitled to being a little rude, a little sharp, present circumstances accounted for. To his credit, Cosetti doesn't back down. The guilt is there but it's taken a backseat to determination, the kind of look that makes Frankie glad that if it can't be him, at least it's someone who appears, on a cursory appraisal, dependable.

"Until you get back," Cosetti says, with measurable force. "I just wanted you to know that, _until you get back_ , Benz, I'll watch out for them. Your unit. Bring my a-game. Thought you deserved to hear that."

As he's leaving, Frankie calls after him, words only slightly muffled by plastic.

"What's your name? Your first name?"

Cosetti stops in his tracks and turns around, wariness flashing for a moment and then gone.

"Matt," he says. "It's Matt."

ooo

"Is it alright if I go sit with him for a while?" Andy's question causes Andrea to look up, put her wrench down, and prop her hand on her hip, looking at him. He looks down, then elaborates as if there's more than one person he could possibly mean. "Frankie Benz. He's still in isolation."

"I didn't know you knew Lieutenant Benz." She says it lightly, wondering what her second in command is thinking. Andrea watches the corner of his mouth twitch, a moment of silence passing before he gives the answer she was anticipating.

"I don't. Not really," Andy admits. He shrugs, fiddles with a washer on the steam valve he's been repairing. "It just feels like the right thing to do, y'know? I wouldn't want to be alone if I was him. At least in medical you've got people around, that kind of isolation, it…" He trails off, looks up and then back down again. "It sounds awful."

Folding her arms, Andrea studies him. Then she smiles, shrugging. "Go on, then. Go before I find something else for you to do."

He's already halfway down the hallway, calling a thanks over his shoulder as he goes.

ooo

"There have been so many people here," Frankie says, and Alisha Granderson tilts her head to the side. "People who aren't my friends. People who hardly know me." He breathes in and out slowly, trying to control the hitching in his chest that he knows is just emotion but terrifies him anyway. Any catch in his breath, tightening in his throat, it makes him certain that this is it, this is when the symptoms start, this is when the virus takes him. "People who have no obligation to me are down here sitting with me, playing cards with me, talking to me."

"I think," says Alisha slowly, studying her hands where they rest in her lap, "everyone understands how easily it could be us. It's dumb luck it was you, and not one of them. Not me." Alisha sighs and rolls her shoulders, cracking her neck. She looks at him through the clear wall, where he sits mirroring her position. Being here with him is frightening, is a reminder of her own mortality, but she owes it to him as a member of her crew. As a human being. Because it could be her. It could be her one day in a plastic bubble, isolated from everyone until they know for sure whether the virus will take her or not.

They sit on the floor for a while, silent reflections of each other.

"How're you feeling?" Alisha asks eventually, then winces. "Sorry. You must be so tired of answering that question."

"Actually, nobody really asks," corrects Frankie. He sounds almost amused. "I think they're worried they'll make it harder for me. Like maybe I forget that I'm waiting to see if I'm gonna die." He snorts softly, shakes his head. Looks at the floor. "As if I could forget." A few more seconds tick by before Frankie seems to remember that Alisha _did_ ask. Did seem to want an answer.

"I'm feeling fine, actually," Frankie says. Quiet. Almost disbelieving. "I don't feel sick at all."

ooo

"Are you sure?"

There's just enough hesitation before Rachel nods that Frankie's heart sinks through the floor, right through the ship, and into the sea.

"The tests are-" she skips a beat and Frankie's pulse follows suit, "-they're almost a hundred percent conclusive."

"Almost?" The word is pitched up at the end, high with disbelief.

"The tests are still so new and this equipment- it's a very, _very_ high likelihood you're completely clear." Rachel's voice is confident and persuasive but it's overshadowed by the dream Frankie's been having whenever he sleeps.

Sickness, overtaking the ship. The Captain, the XO, dead on the floor, hemorrhaged out until no life was left. Rachel. Kara. Danny. All dead.

"We can let you out," Rachel is saying, but Frankie is already shaking his head.

"I'm staying until the end of the quarantine," he says. He's proud of how strong his voice sounds. How sure. How brave. He doesn't feel brave. He feels claustrophobic, like the sheets of plastic he's come to be so familiar with are closing in. Smothering him. "I won't risk the crew on an almost, Dr. Scott, all due respect to you and your skills, and I believe that's a lot. If it's all the same to you, I think I'll…" _I'll run out of here and up onto the deck, hug the first person I see because it feels like forever since anyone touched me, see the sky, get_ out of here. "I think I'll wait out the quarantine."

When she nods, there is more respect in Rachel's eyes than Frankie's seen before, even for the Captain.

"Alright, Lieutenant Benz."

"Please, Dr. Scott, all this time we've spent down here. It's Frankie."

"In that case, Frankie, it's Rachel."

ooo

The smile and determination are short lived, until the sense of being closed in returns and mounts swifter than Frankie can prepare for. His room, if it can be called that, feels like it's getting smaller and smaller, closing in on him, plastic ready to seal his nose and mouth. His pulse spikes and beats, loud and panicked in his ears. It's like all the air has been sucked out and all that's left is the knowledge of the ocean around them and, beyond that, the virus.

The rushing in Frankie's ears, the sound of his own harsh gasping, fills his awareness, blocks Rachel's voice from his hearing until she's repeated herself several times. He looks at her, hands braced on his knees, and holds tight to the knowledge that she's there. That he isn't alone.

"Frankie, I need you to sit down," Rachel is saying, miming towards the floor. He shakes his head but she begins nodding at the same time. "Sit down, here, I'll sit with you."

The floor is cold and hard and Frankie wants to scramble up immediately. Would have, were it not for Rachel.

"Put your back against mine through the plastic here, Frankie. That's it. Feel me here with you. We're both here, we're alright. You're almost there. You're not sick, Frankie, and you're almost out of here. Just lean on me here- that's it."

Rachel is solid at Frankie's back, her presence the only thing grounding him. They sit together, back to back with the plastic sheet crinkling between them. After a minute, Frankie lifts his hand, pressing it to the plastic at his hip. Rachel puts her palm against his and slowly, surely, Frankie's breath slows, and the pounding in his ears recedes until all he can hear is Rachel's voice, telling him about her work.

ooo

"Borrowed it off Ensign Mason in comms," Russ Jeter says, holding up a paperback novel. It looks new, published recently, a woman in a space suit holding a ray gun on the cover. "Heard you were a fan of science fiction. Figured you would appreciate this over the Bible, right now."

Frankie appreciates the gesture, he really does, but- "Can't open the door, Master Chief." Frankie shrugs. "Not unless it's essential."

Russ shrugs easily, and Frankie studies her movement. It looks like everything else the Master Chief does. Slow and deliberate, with thought and intention behind. He always looks like he knows where he's going and why, what he's meant to do when he gets there.

"I've got nowhere to be for a time anyway." Russ opens the book and sits down on a chair someone brought over at some point. "Why don't you make yourself comfortable."

It's no wonder, with the kind of reading voice he has, that Russ makes such a good chaplain.

ooo

Tom isn't wearing a biohazard suit when he starts unzipping the double entry point. Danny is standing behind him, anxious enough that he's bouncing on his heels. Quarantine is over. Frankie is finally, _finally_ in the clear.

"Good to see you out of there, Lieutenant Benz," Tom says, but Frankie isn't really paying attention.

The instant he makes it out of the plastic bubble, Danny is there. Frankie runs into his chest so hard it draws a small huff of breath out of the blond. Danny hugs him back, hard, one hand on the back of his neck, other arm tight across his shoulders.

"You're okay," Danny is saying, words calm, gentle, and only a little shaky, somewhere above Frankie's head. "You're okay. You're okay."

Frankie laughs, short and relieved, chin digging into Danny's shoulder. It's impossible but it's true.

He's okay. It's all going to be okay.

ooo

They pull Bertrise off a fishing boat and when he hears Rachel say the words 'naturally immune', Frankie finally, _finally_ understands.


End file.
